Why does this give a list of voters?
When I go to this website and I choose the upcoming general election and I put in today's date, it gives me the number of early voters in each county. There's a button to make a statewide report and when you hit that it gives you a list of voters, their county, and their voter ID numbers. What's that about?
5 replies
Voting is a matter of public record.
Your vote is private.
The action of voting is not.
There’s little protection on voter registration info. In my state it used to be you could type in any name, with a “sounds like” option, see this information and when they last voted, what party, and by what method. Now you’re required to have a first AND last name, but people can still buy these lists for targeted marketing, so whatever.
Technically it shows party affiliation, or which primary you voted in.
But not who you actually voted for, that's what trump is trying to get when keeps talking about "voter rolls" everything else is public information anyone can easily obtain.
Which primary party ballot they had is only available for primaries in states that have partisan primaries (as opposed to "jungle primaries" where all candidates are on one ballot). Whether a person voted is public. How they voted is private.
It's legally required to make public who voted. Similar reasoning to sweepstakes being required to publicly announce the name of the winning person, it makes it much more difficult to game the results.